


too old to die young now

by Spatz



Series: danger will not turn you back [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amnesia, Body Horror, Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Flashbacks, Gen, Identity Issues, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 17:19:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1477750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spatz/pseuds/Spatz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dreams drive him to the Smithsonian six days after he dives into the Potomac after Captain America.</p>
            </blockquote>





	too old to die young now

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to inmyriadbits and ignipes for the beta, and to rainproof for brainstorming ways to break into the Smithsonian, based on her many (entirely legal) visits there.
> 
> Title from the song by Brother Dege. Russian translations are available in alt text or at the end.

The dreams drive him to the Smithsonian six days after he dives into the Potomac after Captain America.

The news is bad enough. All three of the channels that his motel TV gets have been showing the helicarrier crashes on a near-continuous loop. After the first day, they start showing shaky news helicopter and camera phone footage of Captain America getting arrested the day before. In the videos, the street and nearby bridge are lined with burning and bullet-ridden cars, and he –

_ Она y меня. Найди его. _

_...rendezvous two minutes. Civilians threatened, repeat, civilians threatened._

_Bucky?_

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

_I knew him._

He comes back shaking, and almost three hours have passed. The sheets under the metal hand are in shreds. He was there, in the street. He tried to kill Captain America before. He remembers _needing_ to kill him, to complete his mission. He can still feel the brutal impact of their fight in his bones – but the man just lay there in the broken glass of the helicarrier, bleeding, and said they were friends.

_'Cause I'm with you to the end of the line._

He knew Steve Rogers, even before learning his name. It doesn't make sense.

He doesn't need to kill Rogers anymore, either. That makes even less sense.

He barely sleeps the first three days, between the ache of his dislocated shoulder and the lure of the news. The anchors announce that the body of Secretary Pierce's housekeeper was found, and he knows the woman's name before they say it. They discuss the assassination of SHIELD's director, and he knows how many times the man was shot.

He remembers pulling the trigger.

He remembers Rogers was there, too. Three times, and still–

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

* * *

The news is bad, but the dreams are worse when he finally sleeps. 

He dreams that he's on a roller coaster, someone small and laughing beside him. They soar up, rush down, and they are laughing, laughing, and he _knows_ him– 

And the tracks are train tracks, and he's falling, down through snow, through ice, into water. He tries to surface, but the ice locks him in. He pounds on it, terrified, but the cold is creeping up his arm and the ice is a door, metal, and his hand is metal, and through the window he can see–

He wakes gasping for air, his left arm throbbing impossibly – the sensors there are only designed for pressure and force, not pain. The motel air is frigid, and the seam between his flesh and the metal arm is so cold it burns. 

He stands in the shower until the hot water runs out, and he's still shivering.

The next night is worse, somehow. He's playing baseball, at bat, and the bases are loaded with dead people: neat bullet holes in their foreheads, blood and bone fragments splattered down their backs. The pitcher is Pierce. He swings and misses, fear sinking into his bones like the cold.

A man's voice behind him says, “Your name is James Buchanan Barnes,” and he shudders. He can't turn around.

He swings again, misses again, his hands shaking on the bat. His right hand is sweating; his left hand is metal. It's all wrong, _he's_ all wrong. The man says, “Bucky?”, plaintive and soft, but he can't turn around. If he turns around then Steve will _see_ –

He wakes up before the third strike.

The next night, he doesn't sleep at all. His injuries have healed by now, but the mattress feels too soft – which is strange, because he can't remember ever sleeping on one before. Just the chair in the vault, and the place where they freeze him.

His mind was numb there, even when he wasn't sleeping, even when he was fighting. The numbness muted the pain, the cold; it let him not think about the things he didn't know, or question why he was always, always alone.

But the memories are waking up now, pins and needles in his brain. Ever since he saw the man on the bridge, they've been pushing through the ice, washing up in waves of emotion that _hurt_. 

_But I knew him._

He has to know why. He wants to understand.

The rathole motel he's staying in is too cheap to have much of anything. His room does have a phonebook – tucked right underneath the phone, which doesn't work. He looks up the nearest library in it, and sets out.

He knows how to use a card catalog, but it turns out card catalogs don't exist anymore. There is only a computer labeled 'Library Catalog', which is a problem, because he doesn't know how to use a computer. He's seen enough people use them – in the vault where they prepped him, through a sniper scope, on the television – to get a general idea, but they never trained him for that sort of thing.

Probably in case he ever tried to do exactly this. 

It takes him too long to figure out how the search function works – the interface is nothing like aircraft controls or the communications and explosives equipment he knows, and he can only use one hand. One of the librarians keeps circling past, watching him. He pulls the cap lower over his face, tucks his left hand deeper in his pocket, and counts escape routes. The news hadn't made any mention of a manhunt – no pictures of his face plastered across the screen – but there's always the chance that it was kept quiet, off the radar.

He eventually persuades the catalog to respond, and it coughs up a wide selection of Captain America histories. Nearly all of them are labeled 'checked out'. The only ones left are decades old and bear the unpromising titles _Captain America Spells Freedom!_ and _A Bullet in the Barrel of Your Best Guy's Gun: Captain America, Howard Stark, and the Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex_.

He tracks them both down anyway. It feels safer in the maze of shelves: plenty of projectiles, plus the sightlines and space are limited. His arm will give him the advantage in a fight. The dusty-sweet smell of old paper seeps down into his lungs, settling him out. He has a flash of memory – high arching windows and creaky wooden chairs, a warm narrow shoulder pressed against his – but it falls apart when he reaches for it.

His chest hurts, even though his ribs have been healed for days. He rubs at them, but it doesn't help.

He finds the history book first; it mentions 'James Buchanan Barnes' once, in the middle of a long paragraph about the socioeconomic implications of Rogers' childhood in Brooklyn. The other book uses 'Bucky' to rhyme with 'ducky' on page six. All they tell him is that Barnes and Captain America were friends, like Rogers claimed, and that they grew up together in Brooklyn.

He slides the book back on the shelf, and rests his forehead against it. He's so tired – but if he sleeps, he'll dream. He doesn't know what to do.

The librarian is watching him again as he makes his way through the shelves. He hunches his shoulders and resists the urge to run. _Walk, don't run._ He knows how to hide like he knows how to pick locks, pick pockets, or plant a listening device. Pierce never used him for anything like that. The words are all in Russian in his head, and the skills feel rusty. 

With the rest of that information, though, he knows an address here in DC: an old нелегальный резидент, a _rezident_ who might be able to give him access to the information he wants. If the address is as old as he thinks, the contact might not be HYDRA – or, the man might not be there at all. It's a risk he's not sure he's ready to take.

Passing a display of tourism pamphlets on his way out, a now-familiar flash of red, white and blue catches his eye. He pulls it out: _Captain America: Living Legend & Symbol of Courage_ is a current exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum.

The relief is sharp enough to hurt, but at least he knows what to do.

* * *

Entrance to the Smithsonian is free, but he can see metal detectors just inside the doors when he walks past. He doesn't know if his arm will set them off or not, but he should probably avoid the cameras anyway. The food court exits are a possibility – one-way doors with minimal security, and the whole area is walled in glass, so it's easy to recon. When the guard takes a break, he slips in past a group of boisterous young men as they leave. His clothes don't quite blend with their polos and cargo shorts, but they are all wearing baseball caps like his, and the camera is high placed enough that his hat blocks its view of his face.

The exhibit upstairs is packed with more people than the space can comfortably handle; the crowd makes him twitchy, but it's good cover. Between the release of SHIELD's classified intel and the metal skeletons of the helicarriers in the Potomac, the news announcers on TV can't decide if Captain America is still a hero or not. He guesses that's why so many people are here: looking for a little truth.

His own truth stares out at him from a display in the second room, introducing the Howling Commandos. 'Bucky Barnes', the display reads from its place of honor in the center of the room; his face looks back at him from the frosted glass, like some surreal mirror.

He can't look at the picture too long. The longer he stares, the more the memories of Rogers saying that name come back: the look in his eyes as he stood defenseless and stunned in the middle of the street; the sad twist of his mouth, bruised and bloody beneath his fists. He reads the words instead: a sanitized fairytale about a man who volunteered, was captured, rescued, and kept on fighting. A loyal soldier, a devoted friend – and then a dead one.

But he's not dead. James Buchanan Barnes became the Winter Soldier, and the Winter Soldier is him. 

He is Bucky Barnes.

He flinches away from a group of schoolchildren who push past him, stifling the automatic urge to defend himself. He backs away from the memorial display, away from all the well-meaning words that feel like lies and the videos of a man wearing his face laughing with Rogers. He doesn't know how to make someone smile like that. He can't remember what it feels like to smile like that.

He can't be Bucky.

Can he?

He spends the rest of the day in the exhibit, reading every caption, searching for mentions of Barnes. There's the display of uniforms – the central mannequin is missing, with a sign apologizing for Captain America's uniform being out for preservation. It's a lie – he recognizes the outfit from various pictures around the room, and knows it would have been cut off Rogers by the paramedics. He hadn't stayed to watch.

There's a diagram of one of the Howling Commandos' assaults that mentions Barnes saving Rogers from a sniper. The display neatly labels their positions and the distance; he can't remember taking the shot, but he knows he could have.

The room about Rogers' childhood is the hardest. He doesn't recognize anything, doesn't remember the old tenement or the park nearby. The pictures of Brooklyn do bring up a memory: he killed a man there for Pierce – was it last year? Last decade? Faintly, he remembers they froze him after, so for all he knows it was last century.

Pierce had told him to make it messy, as an example of what HYDRA did to traitors. He tried, but the man kept screaming so loudly and he wasn't supposed to attract attention, so he'd killed him too fast. 

They had punished him for it. 

He recoils from that memory, fights the urge to lash out, to protect himself – there are too many people here, too much security. They'll find him. He doesn't want to go back, doesn't want to forget, doesn't want to freeze. He _wants_. He wants to _know_ , but it's all a house of mirrors. Nothing fits, and all he's got are memories of blood and pain.

Shaking, he ducks into a dark side room with benches, braces himself against the back wall and tries to forget the screaming when he killed the man in Brooklyn. He can't remember it bothering him at the time, but it bothers him now.

Someone says Bucky's name, and he startles. The room is showing interview video playing on a loop, and an elderly Asian man – Jim Morita, he thinks – is talking about downtime with the Howling Commandos, how Cap always opened a tab, and how Bucky liked to dance.

He thinks he knows how to dance. There are a lot of things that he knows how to do but can't remember learning. Most of them involve ways to kill people. It's a relief to find something that's not. His breathing slows – until he thinks about it. 

He tips his head back against the wall and clenches the metal hand into a fist inside his pocket. Dancing's not really an option, anymore.

The video plays on. After Morita, the footage switches to Peggy Carter. A sad-eyed woman in blue, she talks about how Rogers changed her life. 

Pierce told him that he shaped the century, that he was a gift to mankind. The more he remembers, the less he believes it. Seems to him that Captain Rogers shaped the century more than he ever could. Rogers changed _him_ , too – is still changing him. Into what, he doesn't know – but certainly not that boy in the videos, the one who knew how to smile.

The video loops around to Morita again, and he returns to the main hall. Walking past the biographies of the Commandos and the SSR staff who worked with the Captain, he stops, and goes back again.

Peggy Carter's plaque doesn't have an end date. She's still alive.

_Even after he was gone, Steve was still changing my life._

Maybe she'll know what he's changing into.

* * *

The old _rezident_ is still in DC, as it turns out, and is very helpful once he gives the code phrases and asks to find Peggy Carter. The man keeps glancing at his arm, even though he keeps the hand covered in his pocket.

He finds Peggy Carter in a medical facility outside Arlington. Security is subtle, but tight. The guards are wearing SHIELD gear. Old spies are a security risk, he supposes; it makes sense they'd have provisions for that. He wonders what will happen to the facility now that SHIELD is defunct. He watches from a rooftop across the street until he spots a gap in the guard pattern that repeats, then lies down to make himself sleep until it gets dark.

He dreams of couch cushions on a hard floor. The cushions slide away under him, and he falls through the cracks, reaching out desperately to grasp a narrow shoulder. He knows him: the span of his shoulder, the way his thumb comes to rest on the collarbone, this boy who is fragile but somehow strong. They hold each other up – 

_You don't have to. I'm with you 'til the end of the line, pal._

–but it's the wrong hand. Bone crumples under his metal fingers; the boy's pale skin splits and bleeds; his wide blue eyes glaze over. He loses his grip and falls, down into the cold again–

Night has fallen by the time he jolts awake, along with the temperature. He fists his hands in the gravel covering the roof until his knuckles ache and the rocks start to crumble, waits for his heart to slow.

It takes a long time, even when he does the breathing exercises he knows for shooting.

The dark makes getting inside the facility easy, and it doesn't take long to find Peggy's room. Her chart – on paper, thankfully – is locked up at the nurse's station down the hall. There are notes that warn about her increasing dementia and insomnia: she wakes frequently in the night, confused about where she is, and when.

The irony of asking a woman with a ruined memory for answers is not lost on him, but he's already here. He should at least try.

There's a light underneath her door when he approaches. He opens it to find her drowsing under the warm glow of a lamp, a photo album spread across her lap.

The door clicks softly when he shuts it, and she stirs. Blearily, she focuses on him, and a wave of confusion washes over her face. She shifts, looking around, and when she looks back at him her eyes are sharp, her face controlled.

“Sergeant Barnes, what on earth are you doing in the medical wing at this hour?” A brief look of alarm flashes over her face. “Did someone from your unit get injured? Is Captain Rogers all right?”

His spine straightens at the note of command in her voice, a reflex he didn't even know he had. He swallows hard. She thinks he's– that it's the war. 

She raises an eyebrow at him – he's been quiet too long. His voice is rough with disuse when he says, “He's not injured. He was, but he's fine now.” At least, the news had shifted from reporting him as being 'in critical condition' at the hospital to discussing why Captain America wasn't showing up at the congressional hearings. His briefing from HYDRA had said the man healed fast; they'd wanted to make sure he inflicted sufficient damage.

“Ah. Thank you for telling me,” Peggy said, relaxing. She pushes herself up on her pillows and frowns down at the photo album in confusion, running a hand over the binding. “No,” she said slowly, looking around the room more carefully. “Steve was here yesterday. He told me....”

His stomach drops at the realization in her eyes.

“Bucky,” Peggy whispers, staring at him. “My god, you _are_ alive.”

“I'm not Bucky,” he says, knee-jerk.

She tenses, watching him carefully. “I see. Are you here to kill me, then?”

He can see four ways to murder her without raising suspicion, just with the pills on her bedside table, and another eight if he includes the rest of the room. 

“No,” he says. That's not what he wants.

She doesn't relax, precisely, but the edge goes out of her tension. “Good. I may be old, but I'm not ready to die quite yet.” The corner of her mouth quirks up. “Especially if my old friends are going to keep coming back from the dead.”

“Is that what I did?” he asks bitterly. It doesn't feel like it. He wishes she hadn't called him her friend.

“From our perspective. I suppose you saw it rather differently.”

“I feel like I woke up.” From a long, bad dream – only things made sense before and they don't now, like the dream was real life and this is the nightmare. He keeps remembering more of it, and the truth is–

“Bucky–”

“Stop calling me Bucky!” he shouts, then fists his hands in his hair. He thought this would go differently. He thought she would _see_.

“What should I call you, then? James?”

“You don't get it, I don't have a name! I'm the Winter Soldier, I'm the _asset_ ,” he spits. “ _I'm_ the nightmare.” Her face crumples a little at that, but he's been trying to lie to himself all week and it's just the truth. 

“Look at me,” he says, spreading his hands: one metal, one flesh and bone. “I'm not even human any more.” He remembers waking up, and waking up, and waking up, never remembering – and each time experiencing the shock of it anew, the horror of what he was. Even the ice couldn't bury that.

“Nonsense,” Peggy says. She's trying to sound brisk, but her voice comes out a little wobbly. “You think you're the only person in the world with a prosthetic arm?”

“It's not the same.”

“No, it's not.” She presses her lips together. “But it certainly doesn't make you inhuman.”

He looks down at his hands, tries to make the words come out right for everything that's in his head. “No, it's– It's a weapon, not an arm. I can't remember using it for anything else. I can't remember _doing_ anything but killing people. They made it, and they made me, and I–” he trails off, his throat tight. “That's all I am now. Your friend didn't come back from the dead. That guy in the Smithsonian's gone.”

“You saved Steve,” Peggy says quietly.

“I shot him. Three times,” he corrects her. It should have been one head shot at that range, but his shoulder had been dislocated, and he'd used the metal arm. Less accurate. But he'd tried. He remembers trying.

“And then you saved him. Was the first one your choice, or the second?”

“He was my mission,” he says automatically.

“So the second, then.” Peggy smiles at him. “And there you have it. You can make different choices if you want to. If all that you remember is being a weapon, you can learn new things, make new memories. You can be a better person.”

“I'm not sure I know what that means.” The inside of his head is full of death. He can't walk into a room without evaluating it for weapons, can't walk down the street without planning how to kill to evade capture.

“You seem to have the right instincts.” She hesitates, then pulls the forgotten photo album open on her lap. “Perhaps it would help if I–”

Half a second's warning is all he gets – a footstep outside the door, imperfectly concealed – but he is up from his chair and waiting behind the door when it opens. A man in scrubs bursts in, holding a gun at the ready. He grabs the gun, knocks it away across the room, yanking the man inside and kicking the door shut as he grapples him into a chokehold. 

He doesn't want to kill him. He doesn't. He knows how easy it is to crush a man's throat under the metal of his left arm, so he uses his right. It's not as strong, and the man claws at his wrist, pulling it away just far enough to gasp for air, to gasp–

“Я принимаю риск отсутствия!”

–and the Winter Soldier stops. His arms drop to his sides. 

The man shoves him away, gasping, and he steps back obediently. After a moment, the man starts laughing hoarsely, still bent over to catch his breath. “You stupid fuck. Did you think HYDRA doesn't protect its investments? You're far too valuable a tool to just let you wander off.” The man straightens, glancing over to the bed. Peggy is reaching for the call button next to her, but he's faster, twisting her wrist until she is forced to drop it with a pained cry. 

The man laughs and walks back over to where the Winter Soldier is still standing, frozen. He tucks the call button into the Soldier's jacket pocket. “There. Nothing to say? It's a little late to be keeping your mouth shut. You know, you led us right to you, going to see old Kozlov. Pathetic.” The man's lip curls, and then he backhands him across the face. The Winter Soldier doesn't flinch. He lets the familiar pain wash over and past him, and waits for orders.

Deep inside, under the ice, fear curls its fingers around his heart.

“Kozlov. That rat. He _was_ HYDRA, then,” Peggy says, contemptuous. Her voice is shaking very slightly. “Tell me, with all the very special secrets that your group knows, why don't they ever teach you how to _shut up_?”

The man laughs again. “Ironic last words, Agent Carter,” he says. He turns away from the Winter Soldier and starts towards the bed where Peggy is sitting, wide-eyed.

“Bucky,” she says, her voice rising as the man advances, “Bucky, damn you, help me!”

The Winter Soldier waits for orders. His chest hurts, distantly, but he's not supposed to move without orders.

The man rears back suddenly, cursing, a fork sticking out his hand. Peggy follows up with a precisely-swung hit with her photo album, but she is old and slow, and the man blocks the strike, ripping the book away and shoving her back against the mattress. 

“Bucky!” she cries one last time before the man gets a pillow over her face, pinning her down. She flails and claws at his arms, leaving red furrows in his skin, but it's not enough.

 _Bucky_. He blinks, the ice cracking. Bucky doesn't have to follow orders. 

His hands curl into fists.

Two steps bring him up behind the man. Muscle memory does the rest. 

The man falls to the floor with a broken neck, and he looks down at the crumpled body. His stomach turns over. It is so easy to kill.

On the bed, Peggy knocks the pillow away, gasping for air. She looks awful, and he goes to check her pulse, then stops, realizing he's reached out with the metal arm. Switching hands, he checks again: his fingers are shaky, but her pulse is definitely weak and too-rapid. He pulls the call button out of his pocket – they can't all be HYDRA at this facility, surely, and she needs medical attention.

Her fingers wrap around his wrist before he can press the button.

“Wait,” Peggy croaks. “You should go.”

He nods, starting to rise, but her touch on his face stops him. He almost flinches away, but her hand is cool and gentle over the place the man hit him. He finds himself leaning in. 

He can't remember the last time someone touched him and it didn't hurt.

“Thank you, Bucky,” she says.

“I'm not him,” he says automatically. It feels like more of a lie than it did five minutes ago.

“Whether you remember who you are or not, you're still capable of being a good man.”

He looks away. “But I killed him.”

“To save me, and yourself.” Peggy tilts his chin back up, still so gentle, and smiles. Years drop away from her face, and he suddenly thinks that she should be wearing red, with a smile like that. “Oh, my dear boy. You are so young. I know it doesn't feel that way, with all the dead weighing you down, but you have a life in front of you. Please, find Steve and let him help you. Neither of you got to live your life.”

He doesn't know what to say. He looks down, and sees her photo album scattered across the floor where it fell. Next to his foot, there is a photo of Bucky standing with Rogers, one arm slung around his shoulders. Both of them are in uniform, guns on their hips; Steve's shield is strapped to his back. Bucky is gesturing with a helmet pierced by a bullet hole, clearly in the middle of telling some story to Dugan, whose bowler hat is visible at the edge of the picture. Steve is grinning at Bucky, pressed close and trusting.

He still can't be that man, or even a good man, not with the edges of his memory filling in with all the violence he's done over the last seventy years. Even if someday he remembers that story Bucky was telling in the photo, he'll never have that easy happiness again. HYDRA will always want him back – he's already remembering secrets that they were too careless to hide from him, that they thought would be wiped clean. He's always going to walk into a room and know where all the weapons are.

But Bucky wasn't just the friend Peggy and Steve call him. He was a soldier. He killed people, but he protected them, too. There's a line there that he thinks he might be able to find.

Peggy said that he could choose who he wanted to be. He could choose to be Bucky again: _that_ Bucky, the soldier. He could try.

In the silence, Peggy starts coughing. There's a water pitcher on the far side of the bed, and he pours her a glass, helps her drink it.

“Peggy,” he starts, but when she looks up at him, her whole face shifts.

“Sergeant Barnes, what on earth are you doing here?” Peggy demands. She spots the dead man on the floor. “What is going on?”

His chest hurts. He knows what it's like to forget, but for the first time, he knows the loss of being the one forgotten. Was this what Steve felt like, standing in that street? But everyone knows who Steve is; only two people in the world know his name.

If he chooses it.

He takes a deep breath, and Bucky says, “HYDRA, ma'am. This man attacked you.” He picks up the call button and presses it into her hand. “Push this and the doctors will come, alright? I'm–”

Bucky hesitates, then decides to keep telling the truth. 

“I'm going to go find Steve.”

* * *

First things first: he needs information, and supplies. 

Kozlov is still packing when Bucky finds him. He has a bag of cash, and everything else Bucky needs – including a lead on Steve's location. Bucky takes it all, and makes sure Kozlov will not be contacting HYDRA again.

The cargo plane is loud and rickety, but both Bucky and the Winter Soldier learned how to sleep in far worse conditions. He can't control what comes with sleep, though, and he dreams that he's in the chair again. They whisper in his ear and he can't break free of the ice this time. It's going to hurt until he screams, he's going to forget everything but the pain, he's going to _forget_ –

But the pain never comes. Someone is there, pulling the straps away. Steve helps him up, and he kicks a rock aside and finds the key, and they are running down the hallways. He wants to stop and check around the corners but Steve pulls him onward, laughing, dances him over a sea of fire on a tightrope – he remembers how to dance, he _does_. He's scared he's going to fall again, but Steve's arm is warm and safe around his back.

They burst out into the open air, and Steve says, “Hey, Bucky–”

He wakes up smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> Она y меня. Найди его. = I have her. Find him. (thanks to BlackRook and marinarusalka for correcting the translation on this)
> 
> нелегальный резидент = illegal resident (literal trans.); the Russian equivalent an agent working under a non-official cover (aka rezident)
> 
> Я принимаю риск отсутствия = I accept the risk of absence (a paraphrase of a quote ~~from The Little Prince~~ apparently not actually from The Little Prince after all, but still inspired by [this Tumblr photoset](http://cactusspatz.tumblr.com/post/82309843430/to-become-presence-means-accepting-the-risk-of) by agentofmidgard)


End file.
